The various embodiments described herein generally relate to the field of multicast traffic engineering.
Efficient support of multicast traffic by switches and routers is important in modern networks. Applications may include, for example, content broadcasting, ticket distribution in financial markets, disaster recovery, and distributed multimedia systems. A switch may facilitate data packet transmission in a network by replicating a multicast packet from a single input terminal and sending the replicated packets, referred to as a multicast flow, to multiple destinations. While a conventional switching fabric may facilitate transmission of replicated copies of a multicast packet within a switch, such switching fabric, without more, may be susceptible to bandwidth overhead and head-of-line blocking, which may occur when multiple input queues within a switch attempt to transmit multicast packets to a single destination.